5 JavaOne 2014 sessions you wish you could attend

From Java in spaceships to Java horror stories, this year’s Java pilgrimage proves more than ever that the Java language is alive and kicking.

There’s only a couple of sleeps left before the WWDC
equivalent for Java devs kicks off. Apart from the obligatory
keynotes focusing the future of Java, here are five sessions
from the JavaOne and parallel OpenWorld conference that will make
you glad you get to be a part of the Java community.

Believe it or not, Java has made its way into space.
Four engineers from Ai Solutions will explain how NASA’s mission
software has taken Java beyond the cloud. This is one talk we can’t
wait to see – after all, how often does Java get to be this
cool?

The latest Java and JavaFX technologies are very
attractive software platforms for customers involved in space
mission operations such as those of NASA and the US Air Force. The
moderator of the panel in this session will ask each member to
provide a mini presentation followed by a live demonstration of
space mission support software.

Oracle is increasingly pushing Java as the big
language for the internet of things, as we can see from session
titles like “Java
Speaks the Language of the Internet of Things”. And it’s no
surprise. IoT devices are predicted to
double in the next six years, and Oracle wants to be a big part
of that. Here, Andra Keay of Silicon Valley Robotics takes a look
at how users will be communicating with their homes

By 2020 our household robot will most likely be our
house. How will we communicate with it? More and more, our machines
now respond to gesture, touch, sight, and sound, but for the really
natural interaction we desire, we’ll need context and
personalization. Perhaps even character and emotion. After all,
people are social beings. We’re hard-wired to communicate in
certain ways. Our house may be a robot, but it will still seem like
just an environment to us. Will we want a disembodied presence in
our homes? Or will we surround ourselves with small social robot
toys or appliances that become the “face” of the connected house.
The butlers and maids of our machine infrastructure. The
translators of the Internet of Things.

As both technology and office culture make it more and
more viable to work remotely, we’re only beginning to fathom the
impact of the stay-at-home career. In this BOF
(“birds-of-a-feather”) session, Oracle consultant Masoud Kalali
will be taking attendees through the “experiences, pitfalls, to-dos
and to-avoids” of working from home.

Lots of people are working primarily from home, and
some are losing interest, losing touch with work, getting
sidetracked, getting slowly ignored, and becoming ineffective. The
speaker shares what he learned in the past six years of working
from home with distributed developer, QA, and documentation teams
and product management.

In another session from JavaOne’s Agile track,
ZeroTurnaround’s Simon Maple and Java EE specialist Roberto Cortez
take a leaf out of The Moth podcasts and invite attendees to share
their experiences of programming failure.

We all enjoy hearing a good success story, but in the
software development industry, the life of a developer is also made
up of disasters, disappointments, and frustrations. Have you ever
deleted all the data in production? Or maybe you just ran out of
disk space and your software failed miserably! How about crashing
your server with a bug you introduced in the latest release? We can
learn from each other’s mistakes. Come to this BOF, and share your
most horrific development story and what you did to fix it.

Since Oracle officially announced seven new features
for Java 9 last month, developers have been eager to know more
about the company’s plans for the language. Shelved from Java 7,
the most exciting of the new projects is Jigsaw, which brings
modular source code. Here we get to hear from the project’s author
Mark Reinhold and owner Alan Bateman. If you’re as excited about
Java 9 as we are, you’ll want to hear what they have to say.

Project Jigsaw aims to modularize the Java platform,
improve performance and security, and simplify the development and
maintenance of large applications. To achieve these goals, it
proposes to introduce a standard module system. This session
explains the key design principles of the project, shows the
progress made in the past year, and demonstrates its use.

Monday, Sep 29, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM (Hilton –
Imperial Ballroom A)

If you miss this session, there’s also a
Q&A session with the Jigsaw project’s key members.

Coman was Editor of JAXenter.com at S&S Media Group. He has a master's degree in cultural studies and has written and edited content for numerous news, tech and culture websites and magazines, as well as several ad agencies.